Got your doubts about how resilient and secure cloud services might be? You're not alone: legendary Pentagon tech bureau DARPA has launched a push to toughen cloud tech up and make it fighting fit for the cyber wars of tomorrow.
The US tech-warriors have dubbed their armoured cloud project Mission-oriented Resilient Clouds (MRC …

A use for those 1 Petaflop racks they have been looking to field?

Spying on Cloud Computing processes

Yea, I'm going to inject my secret data and computations to some nebulous computing engine where I have no clue as to where it is located, how secure those facilities and communication links are, how my data and code is handled or handed off, etc. This is the wet dream of my adversary's Intelligence Service.

so....

This actually makes sense...

... in a twisted DARPA sort of way.

The USoA military has always had this urge to cling to doodads and gadgets down to towing computers to the battlefield... in the 50s. They would've brought Jacquard looms if they'd thought it would've given them the tiniest of edges.

So they came up with networks that at least in theory might have their hearts bombed out and still survive, and now they're trying to do the same with computing under the "cloud" monniker.

Of course that means checkpointing and moving instances if not quite individual processes around, so I'd be inclined to think they'd be better off with something somewhat more grid-y than cloud-y, but wth. I'm sure they really don't care how.

The security stuff is probably a little different from what you normally get, as they do have the means to, say, put armed guards around the bits that do the actual computing, or set up VPNs with crypto so guarded nobody but the NSA even knows what the algorithms are called, nevermind how they work. The difference is that they're looking to stick in virtualisation wholesale, so just what runs where becomes more nebulous. Probably well worth the added complexity to them.

It remains to be seen how well that stuff actually stands up to enemy fire and whether the provisioning under pressure isn't going to be more of a problem than the edge it might deliver. In that sense it would be useful to keep an eye on all this, even if you're not in the military.

tick tick tick

Hmmm *shiny*

gods below!

They have enough of a hard time keeping track of their documents when a Senate Congressional Hearing is demanding to oversight them. This would make it easy for them to one-button delete everything and claim it to be a server error and that it's going to take weeks/months to restore.

And can you imagine how they'll freak out when their memos and what not that are stored un-redacted on these servers suddenly gets leaked to the outside world? They'll think the debacle with Wikileaks and Bradley Manning a romp in the park.

I don't know whether I should be feeling amused or dread.... Probably both.